Abortion and the Christian Response

This Sunday is "Sanctity of life" Sunday in our country.

I thought I might give you a biblical and sane response to those who are pro-choice from a godly Christian guy, our General Superintendent.

I trust you will take the time to read it and search the scriptures that are given.

Abortion and the Christian Response
By GEORGE O. WOOD
Published in ADVANCE, October 1984

Each year since 1973 an estimated 1.5 million babies have been aborted in the United States, an average of three every minute. In many major metropolitan areas the number of abortions exceeds the number of live births.
This devastating carnage of human life has been called “The Silent Holocaust” and “The Slaughter of the Innocents.”
How did this situation come about? Should we be concerned, even alarmed? What counsel do the Scriptures give us? What actions must be taken?

A Brief History
On January 23, 1973, the Supreme Court handed down its Roe v. Wade decision which allowed abortion on demand. This ruling immediately struck down all laws prohibiting abortion in the 50 states and U.S. territories. It opened the floodgates for legal abortions to increase from a few thousand annually to a million and a half.
The ruling essentially apportioned a pregnancy into trimesters. In the first trimester, the issue of abortion was left solely in the hands of the mother and her doctor (albeit most abortions are presently done in clinics where the mother does not even know the doctor or later remember his name). There could be no state or governmental prohibition of abortion. The Court did not take note of the fact that at 13 weeks, when most abortions begin, the developing baby is a completely organized entity-an actual miniature Child in, the mother’s womb, a Child with fingerprints that have been established for al1 time.
During the second trimester of pregnancy, the state could enact only laws which regulated abortion in ways “reasonably related to the mother’s health.” This meant simply that the state may determine who is qualified to perform the abortion and where the abortion may be performed. Given a qualified doctor and a qualified medical setting, the mother was free to have an abortion during the second trimester of pregnancy.
Only during the third trimester (the 6th and 7th month) of pregnancy, when the fetus was viable (i.e., capable of sustaining life on its own outside the womb) could the state pass a law forbidding an abortion if that abortion was not necessary to preserve the mother’s “life or health.” Since health may mean mental and attitudinal well-being, the Court’s decision effectively grants the right to an abortion even in the last day of pregnancy if a mother does not want to bear the Child.
The same Court which permitted abortion on demand stopped the construction of the $116,000,000 Tellico Dam in Tennessee because its completion carried the possibility of making extinct the snail darter, a 3-inch fish.
A dramatic development now taking place will most likely bring a steep increase in the rate of abortion. Thousands of man-hours and millions of dollars have been expended on the development of a do-it-yourself abortion product which does not have nauseous or other negative side effects. The drugs (prostaglandins), if marketed, will allow self-administered abortions during the first trimester of pregnancy to take place at home rather than requiring the mother’s presence in a doctor’s office or clinic.
The United States Congress has thus far shown an unwillingness to approve a human life amendment for submission to states’ ratification which defines an unborn Child as a person protected by the 5th and 14th articles of amendment to the Constitution.
Failing Congressional and state action, the only present political hope for change is in the appointment of new Supreme Court justices. Five of the present nine are past the age of 75; therefore, the President who assumes Office January 20, 1985, may well have the opportunity to appoint justices who can reverse Roe v. Wade.

Concern and Alarm
Three major views are expressed today regarding abortion. 1. The unborn is not a human life, and therefore no moral issues are at stake. Zygote and fetus displace the word baby because the latter is too personal and human. Some have called pregnancy the most common “tumor” women acquire-the developing baby is simply “tissue.” One has no more moral compunction in excising the “tissue” than in removing an appendix. 2. The unborn is a potential human life and certain safeguards may be in order. The difficulty in this view is its ambiguity as to when “personhood” or “humanness” takes place: conception, quickening, viability, birth? 3. The unborn is a human life, a person in the full legal sense and entitled to the protection afforded all other human life. Michael Gorman, in his well-researched Abortion and the Early Church (InterVarsity Press, 1982), conclusively shows that the Christian church of the first 3 centuries held unwaveringly to this position against the abortion-on-demand attitudes and practices of pagan culture.
The abortion ethic of pre-Christian, non-Judaic Greek and Roman cultures is being reborn in America. The pro-abortion mindset of those cultures went hand in hand with infanticide (the killing of born babies) and euthanasia (the killing of the weak, handicapped, and old). Abortion is the wedge issue through which other horrors seek to enter.
We need to relearn the lesson of the Holocaust. It did not begin with the killing of Jews. The Holocaust began with an idea: an idea flowing out of Hegel (1770- 1831) and Nietzsche (1844-1900)-both of whom started out as young men to train for the ministry.
Hegel insisted there are no absolute moral values. In any given society there are competing views of right/wrong (thesis and antithesis) which, by a rational process reach the compromise of synthesis. Synthesis is that which the majority of people regard as useful. As life goes on, people’s values change-today’s synthesis becomes tomorrow’s thesis: ultimately a new synthesis is produced. Morality is never fixed, it is always moving. Yesterday’s wrong becomes tomorrow’s right. New thinking replaces old thinking: the good is simply that which is useful.
Nietzsche went beyond Hegel to say the center of moral value is power. The rule of the strong which develops a better race is the highest good; the chief evil becomes any protection of the weak.
Francis Schaeffer and C. Everett Koop in their book, Whatever Happened to the Human Race? (Regal, 1979), detail the effects of the Hegelian/Nietzschian mind-set in pre-World War II Germany.
“The first to be killed were the aged, the infirm, the senile and mentally retarded, and defective children. Eventually, as World War II approached, the doomed undesirables included epileptics, World War 1 amputees, children with badly modeled ears, and even bed wetters. Physicians took part in this planning on matters of life and death to save society’s money” (p. 106).
Long before the killing started and the subsequent genocide against the Jews, Germans were psychologically conditioned to accept it through propaganda which trumpeted that the state does a far better thing to spend money to build housing for the newly married than to keep sick and weak people alive (just as today the aborted child is “inconvenient” and costly in an economic and social sense-therefore, such a child-in-the-womb is disposable).
No wonder Malcolm Muggeridge calls abortion “the slippery slope.” Abortion is the beginning of our slide to Auschwitz.
In his book, Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation (Nelson, 1984), President Reagan quotes an unnamed Nobel Laureate (actually, Dr. Francis Crick, as cited in John Powell’s powerful book, Abortion: The Silent Holocaust: Argus, 1981) as saying: “No newborn infant should be declared human until it has passed certain tests regarding its genetic endowment and that if it fails these tests it forfeits the right to live.”
Dr. Bernard Nathanson, who presided over a New York clinic that did 60,000 abortions in a year and now is an antiabortionist, cites in his book Aborting America (Doubleday, 1979) a bioethicist professor at San Francisco State University, Mary Ann Warren, as advocating calling the prenatal Child “alpha.” “Alpha” would have no more right to life than a newborn guppy. “Alpha” could be raised for the intentional purpose of slaughter in order to acquire its organs for transplant. Others have advocated that a born baby not be declared a human until 3 days to a week after birth to ascertain which babies are healthy and which are desirable for extinction.
Why cite these examples? Why bother with Hegel and Nietzsche? With Nazi Germany and the Holocaust? Because our society is saying it is morally permissible to slay babies in the womb when they are: (1) not wanted; (2) not convenient; and (3) not useful. The same arguments apply to infanticide and euthanasia. We cannot afford to be, as former Interior Secretary James Watt said at the 1983 General Council, like the people who lived in the villages next to the smokestacks of the Nazi crematoriums and did nothing!

Biblical Considerations
The first five books of Scripture were written by a man saved from infanticide. His parents resisted the awesome pressure of their day to dispose of their baby (Exodus 2:1-3).
The prophets Isaiah (Isaiah 49:1,5) and Jeremiah (Jeremiah 1:5) were keenly conscious that the Lord formed them in the womb; knew, called, and consecrated them in their prenatal state. Job traced his continuity as a person back to God’s curdling, clothing, and knitting him in the womb (Job 10%12). David indicated the inheritance of fallen Adamic nature begins at conception (Psalm 51:5). .He celebrated God’s intimate knowledge of his personhood in the womb in lyrical exultation:
“For you created my inmost being;
you knit me fogether in my mother’s womb.
I praise you because I am fearfully and
wonderfully made …
My frame was not hidden from you
when 1 was made in the secret place.
When 1 was woven together in the depths of the earth,
your eyes saw my unformed body.” (Psalm 139:13-16)

Exodus 21:22-25 reflects the protection of the Mosaic law for a pregnant mother who is inadvertently struck during a fight. If she gives birth prematurely and no injury occurs, then the offender is fined; if injury occurs, the law of retaliation applies (“eye for eye,” etc.).
The critica1 exegetical question is whether the law of retaliation applies if the mother and/or the child is injured, or just the mother. If the mother only (i.e., injury to the child goes unpunished), the lack of retaliation for injury to the baby stems not from a Biblical devaluing of the baby’s inherent worth. Rather, the attacker’s intent to harm was directed against the mother and not the Child; therefore, lesser responsibility is involved because of nonintentionality.
The New Testament bears witness that human life commences at conception, and the unborn baby is human. The birth narratives of John the Baptist and Jesus trace their personhood back to within the womb. Jesus is conceived by the Spirit: to abort the zygote in Mary would have been to destroy the Incarnate One. It was through conception that the Word began His life as flesh. John the Baptist, 6 months after conception and 3 months before birth, leaps for joy in bis mother’s womb at the arrival of Mary who had just become pregnant with Jesus (Luke 1:39-45). The 6-month child-in-the-womb, John, already is possessed with spiritual consciousness.
The scriptural examples cited above establish the existence of human life from conception; and increasing evidence from the scientific community is corroborating that view (see Rites of Life by Dr. Landrum Shettles and David Rorvik: Zondervan, 1983).
Dr. and Mrs. J, C. Wilkie Handbook on Abortion; Hayes, 1971) eloquently speak of the beginning of human life from the moment of conception:
“When . . . at fertilization the 23 chromosomes from the sperm join 23 chromosomes from the ovum, a new being is created. Never before in the history of the world nor ever again will a being, identical to this one, exist. This is a unique being, genetically totally different from the body of the father or the mother, independent, programmed from within, moving forward in an ongoing, self-controlled process of maturation, growth, development, and replacement of his or her own dying cells. . . The ultimate scientific fact that all must face and deal with is that. . . . Nothing, no bits or pieces, will be added to this living human from the time of fertilization until the old man dies, nothing except nutrition. Each of us existed in toto at that moment; all that we have done since then is mature” (p. 10).
Perhaps John Powell has best summarized the Biblical understanding of our humanness from conception on: “The greatest gift of God, 1 would think, is the gift of life. The greatest sin of humans, it would seem, would be to return that gift ungratefully and unopened’ (p, 1).
What Should We Be Doing?
Following are suggestions as to what, in my opinion, we as Christians can and should be doing about the abortion issue.
First, we need to use correct vocabulary. The pro-abortionists, like Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, are using disinformation in their choice of language, The unborn baby is a fetus; while this term is medically correct, it is psychologically dehumanizing. Let’s use baby, child, unborn child instead. Pro-choice sounds nice; pro-killing is the accurate term. The aborted baby certainly did not have a choice.
Termination of pregnancy makes human the barbarism of (1) suction abortion where the baby is torn apart limb from limb and deposited in a jar as just so much fetal waste material; (2) dilatation and curettage abortion where the curette instrument cuts and scrapes the baby in bits and pieces from the womb; (3) saline solution, where 16-week and older unborn babies are poisoned and burned through injection and delivered dead 24 to 36 hours later looking like a candied apple whose skin has been burned off; or (4) hysterotomy abortion where the child is removed surgically in a procedure similar to Caesarean section delivery-the aborted baby is simply discarded in a stainless steel bowl.
Termination of pregnancy is inappropriate: it’s the baby who is being terminated. As Christians, we need to cal1 things by their real names! Dr. Nathanson once speculated how many abortions there would be if the abdominal wall of the pregnant woman were transparent.
Second, we must be involved in the political process. Through adoption of a human life amendment, we can end legal abortions. We have a precedent in the adoption of the 14th amendment which reversed the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision of 1857. In the Dred Scott case, the Court ruled that a black was not a legal person even though he had biological life. That decision was not reversed in a day, or even a year or a decade; but it was reversed!
What the Court once decreed about blacks, it has now said about the unborn. We reject the view that the Court-made legal right is morally right, It will take the same forte of Christian conscience to reverse Roe v. Wade as it took to reverse the Dred Scott decision.
Christians are compelled to work for the defeat of al1 in political life who are opposed to a human life amendment. The adoption of this amendment will not only prevent the killing of the unborn, but also give needed protection against the killing of the weak, the handicapped, and the elderly, Mother Teresa has rightly said, “Abortion is a crime that kills not only the child but the consciences of all involved.”
Third, we must recognize that righting a legal wrong will not solve the problem of sin. Pro-abortion attitudes are part of a secular humanistic culture and life-style where emphasis is placed on “me-first” and “I’ll do what 1 want.” Human life apart from Christ is in rebellion against God’s authority in all areas. Christians must engage in the political battle to change the law; but a change in law will not change the human heart, Therefore, we must give priority to spiritual solutions. What the world needs is Jesus!
Fourth, we must not allow our antiabortion stand to be interpreted as antichoice or antiwoman. We insist a mother has no more moral or legal authority to kill the Child inside the womb tltan she does outside the womb. Abortion is not a matter of women’s right, but human rights-the right of a child to live. President Reagan cites this factor of human rigltts in quoting a letter written by a young pregnant woman, Victoria: “In this society we save whales, we save timber wolves, and bald eagles, and Coke bottles. Yet everyone wanted me to throw away my baby” (p.35).
Fifth, we need to be informed so we can give a reasoned response for our position on abortion and not just an emotional outcry. When persons ask us why we are opposed to abortion, we need to make a compelling itelligent response, Read key books such as Clifford Bajema’s Abortion and the Meaning of Personhood (Baker, 1974), John Powell’s Abortion: The Silent Holocaust (Argus, 1981), Shettles’ and Rosvik’s Rites of Life (Zondervan, 1983), and others (some of which are referred to above).
Sixth, we need to proclaim Christ’s and the Scripture’s teaching that sexual intercourse outside marriage is sin. Sexual promiscuity is directly related to the abortion epidemic. The fastest way to end the murder is to return to personal purity.
Seventh, we must not only proclaim God’s judgment upon sin, but also His mercy upon those who have sinned.
Abortion is the quiet sin, and some Christian women in our churches are struggling with the guilt no onc but God knows. We have good news for those women: that the blood of Christ cleanses us from all sin, that repented-of sin is forgiven sin (1 John 1:7,9), that al1 sin may be forgiven except the one which rejects the Spirit’s witness to Jesus (Mark 3:28,29), that as far as the east is from the west so He has separated our sins from us (Psalm 103:12).
Eighth, we need to give wholehearted encouragement and support to pregnant mothers, married and unmarried. We must be active in the financial, @ritual, and psychological undergirding needed by unwed mothers. We must encourage them to compensate a wrongful sexual act with the redemptive act of personal self-sacrifice in bringing their Child to birth. That unwed mother’s baby wants life, and many adoptive parents want the baby she will bear. We need special days in our churches for the recognition of babies, of mothers and fathers, of festive moments when the life of a child is celebrated.
Finally (first, second, and always), we need to pray. Second Chronicles 7:14 brings the assurance that the humility, repentance, and prayers of God’s people can save a nation. It is time to pray that the horrible cloud of ungodliness and inhumanness settling upon our nation will be lifted! It is time to pray that a great spiritual awakening will come to America, and that human life will be kept sacred and redeemed!